Something most people don't know is that a referee has his own stats in Football Manager 2006. Just as in real life, the match officials will act according to their personality and their quality. So next time you see an unjustified red in your match, or a weird penalty, remember that this could be because simply the referee is not good enough. That's why it often pays to do some research and notice which referee's for exemple give red cards easily. This way you could adjust the tackling of your players, so as to avoid being left with 20 men on the pitch.

First of all a referee has the classical attributes of all players: CA, PA and reputation. Here Cantalejo scores rather well, with a PA of 177 and a CA of 165.

Then comes the real stuff. Your referee is judged in 7 areas: Allowing flow, discipline, important matches, pressure, refereeing, running the line, and time keeping.

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Most of those are self explanatory. Discipline is the one related with red cards and the ability to control players through the match, so this is the most important attribute for you to know. (you can get an idea of it by looking in the referee stats, and see how many cards he has given in the league .

So let's see why Cantalejo failed. He can not discipline players (8) Thus the ridiculous red to Materazzi. He is not a man of important matches (10), definitely not for a world cup one; and he can not handle pressure (9). Blatter put too much pressure on the referees asking them to show cards easily and Cantalejo can't get it.

He scores decently (14-16) to all other areas. His lowest in in refereeing (14) which probably explains the funny 93rd minute penalty, but this could also simply be due to the pressure of the last minute.

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